Passion and Purity - 3 Sessions Combined

ligonier ministries the teaching fellowship of rc sproul presents passion and purity with elizabeth elliott this message is entitled a young man falls in love my name is laura scranton and it is my pleasure to invite you to be here with elizabeth elliott as she gives this talk on passion and purity you may wonder why gren and elliott and i said my wife you may know that she was married to jim elliot who was killed in 1956 what you may not know she also had a second husband addison leach he was a college professor and he died after a short four-year marriage we've now been married 12 years and i still feel good and hope that i hang around for a long time and of course with the mix-up in or the little two-name situation i want to assure you that we go by grand in private life and of course on the road there's a penalty that i pay sometimes but it's well worth it people will come up and say oh i'm so glad to meet you mr elliot so i just tell them i'm mr elliott iii and go from there so it is my pleasure to give to you my wife elizabeth elliott [Applause] even though i have had the privilege of having three husbands i want you to know that most of my life i've been single you can figure out the mathematics if you want to i was married for 27 months to number one and for four years and eight months to number two and it will be 12 years in december of 1989 that i will have been married to lars but you can see that i'm an old lady so obviously i've been single most of my life and i'm so glad for the opportunity to talk today about a very popular subject about which i hold some very unpopular views and i'm not ashamed of those because i got them out of a very ancient book i was accused one time when i had spoken on canadian television of holding victorian views and i said well dear lady when the reporter called me to challenge me on this i said my views are much older than that i didn't get them from queen victoria i got them from the bible and i expect to be challenged if you think that i say things which cannot be supported by the scriptures it is my purpose always to give you what god says about things and of course i will occasionally be giving you some opinions especially in talk number three that you may want to discard and i can't tell you that they're the law of sinai but i'm grateful for the opportunity to speak out on some things which i think have been the area of a great deal of confusion it was c s lewis who said that the only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly free from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell now think of that the only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly free from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell obviously in heaven there are no dangers or perturbations of any kind in hell there isn't any love so here we are today in between heaven and hell and we are physical bodies filled with roiling emotions we are very of the earth earthy and that is exactly what i want to talk to you about today i have thick files of letters that have come to me in response to this book passion and purity i couldn't tell you how many stories sad stories that i have from people who've said if only i had read that book 10 years ago if only somebody had told me these things back when my when i was young as your parents told you when you were young i thank god for christian parents who were faithful in teaching me about sexual purity i have letters by the dozens from young women who have been taken for ride led down the garden path as it were by young men very often talking very spiritually and one way or another they either just fade off into the woodwork or they manage to steal the girl's virginity and of course in a sense it's not really stolen because she has given it away and they're just heartbreaks i get hundreds of letters so the story i want to tell you in this first talk which i've entitled a young man falls in love i'm going to begin at an odd point it was back in 1960 that i was sitting in a little thatched roofed house in the eastern jungle of ecuador i had a small tape recorder and sitting on the floor my mud floor next to my hammock was a man who was wearing nothing but a piece of string i don't mean a g-string i mean a piece of string this man's name was geekita and he was a member of a tribe of indians called alkas auca i was living there in that tribe with these people also in the same kind of house that he had no walls no floors and no furniture and i had been struggling to learn an unwritten language which hardly well nobody i think literally nobody outside of that tribe had ever learned before finally after a year of hard work and many mistakes i had learned enough of it so that i could ask questions and there were questions that were burning in my mind i asked dikita to tell his story of what had happened four years before in 1956 and so he began with great enthusiasm speaking into this little tape recorder telling me about how one day a little yellow airplane flew over their house and dropped gifts and he said we grabbed the gifts there were things like spoons and aluminum pots and knives and beads and i've forgotten what all and he said the next week the plane came again and the next week it came again and again and again and he said we sat there and we talked about who these people were that were dropping us these nice things it seemed like a bird a big bird from heaven maybe and these might be gifts from the gods but when the plane swooped very low over their houses they could see that these people had a very strange color of skin and very strange colored hair skin that was insipid and pale and hair that looked like palm fiber they said but the day came when we realized that these men were not coming to see us in the plane anymore they had made a camp on the edge of our territory and so he said we had great arguments about whether or not these men were really friendly or whether perhaps they were treacherous so we discussed should we kill them or shouldn't we now there was nothing new to gikita and his other friends in killing people they had done quite a bit of that and they had had almost all the men in their tribe killed in that that particular group of the tribe killed there were only seven men left in this particular area 53 women and children and seven men should we kill them or should we not are they coming to eat them or are they not so he said we finally sent four women out of the jungle into that camp to see what these men would do to them and he said we thought we knew what they would do to them but all they did was laugh and talk a language we couldn't understand and they gave them food and they gave them some more gifts but he said i was sitting there in the jungle with my spears in my hand and i said to my friends i am going to use my spear i brought my spear i'm going to use it so he said i jumped out and i sank that spear into the back of one of those men and he went on in very very vivid detail about what had happened that afternoon well of course you may have guessed by now that one of those five missionaries that was in that camp was my husband jim elliott and all five of the men were speared to death and when gekita finished his story he turned to the picture that i had of jim elliott over on the on a stack of wooden boxes that i used for a bookcase and he said so that's your husband there and i said yes he said what was his name and i said jim and he said he tried to say it and he said well he's laughing at us if we had known him the way we know you he would be sitting here laughing with us today but he said we didn't know we thought he was going to eat us now the word went around the world that stone age people had killed american missionaries people were stunned by this event and of course reporters came to ask us why they went in there these five men were they blankety-blank fools were they adventurers was it a stunt and we tried to explain and one of the verses from the bible that i used by way of an attempt to explain to these reporters what made no sense to them was first john 2 17 the world and all its passionate desires will one day disappear but the man who is following the will of god is part of the permanent and cannot die following the will of god so that's what it was all about they said i said yes obedience to jesus christ who told us to go into all the world and preach the gospel well of course the christian church called them martyrs and there aren't very many martyrs that we know about from our country in other countries there have been thousands of christian martyrs in the 20th century but we rarely hear hear of them in our country so it was a startling piece of news and i want to take you back to the making of that kind of a disciple i don't really like the word martyr it originally was the greek word that meant a witness that word i like but the idea that certain people are singled out as being holier than the rest of the world i think is mistaken but it takes something for a man to consider obedience to jesus christ literally a matter of life and death so i'm going to take you back to 1947. i was a college student and there was a college student on this campus that i was very interested in as were practically all the other girls on the campus he was very visible and very popular and much of a leader but there was one peculiarity about him that we all recognized which was that he never dated his name was jim elliott and when he went to college he decided that he was going to get two degrees the ba bachelor of arts which wheaton college was certainly qualified to confer the other degree which to him was much more important than the bachelor of arts was aug approved unto god he took that from paul's letter to the young man timothy and jim had decided that if he was going to be approved unto god he was going to have to eliminate some things from his college schedule things like dating and he had not been a woman hater at all in college in high school in fact he had gone what we used to call steady with a girl in high school and he discovered that girls could be a tremendous fascination and an awful waste of time and money and so they decided that they would that he he decided that he would simply delete girls from his college schedule and the other thing which i did not learn from jim i learned it from my brother dave who happened to be a housemate of his was an hour of sleep in the morning that last precious hour before breakfast time that most college students consider very important somehow they don't seem to consider the time before midnight as being very important but anytime after that is different well jim elliott got up about five o'clock in the morning not to study as some students did but to read his bible and to pray because the thing that mattered to him more than anything else in the world was to be approved unto god and to learn to know jesus christ and that takes a ranging time for prayer and for bible study well that impressed me very deeply when my brother told me about this i was also impressed by the fact that jim was a campus clown you know one of those people that could be called upon in a moment's notice to stand up and do comedy for everybody's entertainment he was a popular spiritual leader as well he was the president of the foreign missions fellowship he was a champion wrestler he had won the championship of four states in his weight class and was called the india rubber man because his opponents could pin him could tie him into the most unbelievable knots but nobody ever once succeeded in pinning him so in addition to being a campus clown and a spiritual leader and an athlete he was also a scholar and he graduated with highest honor in classical greek well i had my eye on this young man he was very handsome in addition to that i mean he had a wrestler's build and nowadays i guess you'd call him a hunk in those days we call them dream boats and he was also what we called a bto a big time operator or a bmoc a big man on campus well i was nothing but a two a teeny weeny operator and there wasn't the slightest chance that jim elliott was ever going to look at me i had been a wallflower all the way through high school and college very few dates had i ever had and i knew that a man of his stature and his talents and his popularity would never look twice at me well i remember the day when our yearbooks came out i stood in line i guess with probably 50 other girls waiting for jim's autograph and i was hoping in my heart of hearts that he would put something besides just jim elliott well i was thrilled he grabbed my book he wrote his flourishing signature jim elliott over his picture and then he did put something else but he shut the book handed it back to me you can imagine how fast i grabbed it and tried to find the page and i saw that he'd written a scripture verse well i didn't recognize it second timothy 2 4 so you can imagine how long it took me girls to get back to the dormitory and grab my bible and i looked up ii timothy 2 4 and what did i find but this a soldier on active service will not become entangled in civilian affairs he must be holy at his commanding officer's disposal well in a sense my heart sank to my toes because i thought here's a personal message for me he's letting me know that neither i nor anybody else nor anything is going to deflect him from following the path of the will of god but i liked that it was the other side of what that did to me which which showed me that jim elliott in addition to being all those other outstanding things that i had told you had made the decision which was more important to me than anything else in the world which was that jesus christ was lord of his life and as i talk to young people high school kids college kids i find that very few of them have made any final choices you can ask them what they want on their big mac and usually they know you could tell them i'm going to give you 50 000 you can go out and buy any car you want and i dare say most of them would have some idea what kind of a car they would want but if i say what do you want more than anything else in the world then i draw a blank so here was proof positive that jim elliott had made up his mind whose he was we hear a lot about that question who am i but a much more important question is whose am i and so from a distance mind you i had never had a date with jim elliot i had hardly ever had a conversation with him except over greek or something i knew that here was the man with the kind of character that i was hoping god might give me someday for a husband well a few months later just before i graduated to my utter astonishment jim elliott asked me to go for a walk we had just been at a foreign missions fellowship picnic and i was one of the last cleaning up and so was he and he said can i walk you back to the dorm and i said sure so this beautiful sunny may morning we started to walk down the sidewalk and we hadn't been walking more than a block or two when he said well i think we better get squared away how we feel about each other and i said well first place i was floored because number one i was a little a little angry to think that he was taking it for granted that i had some feelings for him because i thought i had done a bang-up job of concealing my feelings and i had not by so much as the flicker of an eyelash let him know that i was interested in him nor had i talked to other people about it but of course my heart leaped to think that he actually had some feelings for me but i said to him what do you mean and he said what do you mean what do i mean you know what i mean i'm in love with you well no i i said i i didn't know that he said you didn't know that he said well you must be deaf dumb and blind he said i've been trying to show you in all kinds of ways and as i look back i could see little things where my heart had jumped and i thought well maybe he did look at me twice maybe he did climb over three people to get to the seat next to me in greek class but then i said don't be a fool don't tell yourself that this guy would ever look at you twice so anyway we turned around instead of going back to the dormitory we went back to the park and we sat down on the grass and we talked for seven hours and we learned that in fact god has been had been taking each one of us through exactly the same course of coming to the place of willingness to say lord if singleness is what you want for me for the rest of my life i'll take it and to our amazement we discovered that god had used the same scripture passages he had used the same hymns we were both great on memorizing hymns jim had memorized 19 verses of the hymns the hymn the sands of time are sinking one of my favorites and we had also memorized the same amy carmichael poetry things like and shall i pray thee change thy will my father until it be according unto mine and so we compared notes and of course it would have been very easy for us to conclude that even though both of us had come to the point of saying lord i'm willing to be a single missionary you can imagine i did not like the idea of being an old maid missionary but i didn't see that i had any prospects of being anything else and jim also had come to the place through much agony of soul of saying lord if you want me to be single i'll stay single for the rest of my life it would have been easy for us to conclude that now god had brought us together and the obvious thing would be for us to get engaged and get married but number one i was graduating jim was not he had one more year to go number two i was going to africa i thought and jim was going to south america and number three and this is much more important than the other two we both knew that sexual passion is a tornado and that we ourselves could not control it now i had been praying since i was 16 years old that god would never allow me to fall in love with anybody that i was not going to be to marry and for both of us and i believe for every young person and if it was true 40 50 years ago it's much more true now i believe that for every young person the area of sexuality is a crucial battleground and if jesus christ is not lord of your love life jesus christ is not lord of your life now if jesus christ is your savior if you claim to be a christian then you are automatically bound by what the scripture says and by what jesus taught his disciples and so there we were sitting there in the park talking about this strange course through which god had been bringing us and i remember jim sitting there on the grass and looking at me and he said i'm not asking you to marry me i'm not even asking you to wait for me he said you go ahead and go to africa i'm going to go ahead and go to south america he said we're going to turn this whole thing over to god and if god wants to bring us together god knows how to do that if it takes miracles or whatever he knows how to do that but we are not taking this thing into our hands and then he looked me straight in the eye and he said it's not going to be easy he said you know you've got the body of a woman and i've got the body of a man and quite honestly i'm hungry now we were sitting at least this far apart facing each other on the grass he never touched me well we had about two weeks i think left before i graduated and we took some more walks and we had some more talks and one night on one of those walks we sort of wandered without thinking into a cemetery and we sat ourselves down on a convenience slab and we talked some more and i said you know jim if you're serious about turning this thing back completely to god and not taking it into our own hands do you think it makes sense for us to correspond because he had suggested that we could at least write letters well it was a long silence he didn't jump at the idea but then he said i think you're right bet because this morning in my bible reading i came across the story of abraham and isaac and god asked abraham to give to him the most precious thing in his life and abraham went up the mountain laid the wood on the altar tied his son isaac down on that altar and raised a knife and he said i asked myself what's the most precious thing in my life and of course the answer was you so he said i put you on the altar and in the will of god that is where you're going to stay unless in some way somehow sometime god gives you to me but until such time if god ever gives me the green light i'm going to be a single man maybe for the rest of my life he was going into jungle work pioneer work the sort which other missionaries had told him required single men and so jim had committed himself to be single until such time as god might indicate to him that marriage would not be a hindrance to his work and we sat there in silence and suddenly we realized that the moon had risen behind us and was casting the shadow of a stone cross on the slab between us and now you know how far apart we were sitting that time and i wrote a poem at that time a little later hold thou thy cross between us blessed lord let us love thee to us thy power of forward to remain prostrate at thy pierced feet there is no other place where we may meet set thou our faces as a flint of stone to do thy will our goal be this alone oh god our hearts are fixed let us not turn consume all our affections let thy love burn well it was a battleground and we fought it on our knees not in the back seat of a car not in positions where we would have known that temptation would have overcome us but i go back to the determination that that young man had made when he was a high school student mind you he was no spiritual giant at this point but at in high school he had made up a he had made a final choice in high school he had said jesus you are my commanding officer and a soldier on active service will not become entangled in civilian affairs he must be holy at his commanding officer's disposal and that's exactly where jim elliott wanted to be now i hope that i've given you enough details that would indicate to you that he was a man he was a real man he was a man of tremendous passion but he also wanted to be a man of purity and i want to say to you today that if your goal is championship in sports or financial success in the business world or stardom as an entertainer nobody is going to think you're weird if you discipline yourself if you make sacrifices maybe sacrifices as great as your family your marriage everything that we ought to be holding dear don't we see that happening people sacrificing virtually everything for money for sports for stardom nobody will think of you as strange but if a man sets as the goal of his heart purity if he wills one thing that is the will of god he has to be prepared to be thought very weird indeed and jim elliott memorized also a poem of amy carmichael's which he quoted to me more than once lord crucified oh mark thy holy cross on motive preference all fond desires on that which self in any form inspires set thou that sign of loss and when the touch of death is here and there laid on a thing most precious in our eyes let us not wonder let us recognize the answer to this prayer i speak to you today will you make a final choice to let jesus christ be lord of your life some of you have undoubtedly also blo already blown it i would be very naive if i thought i was speaking only to virgins in my next talk i'm going to talk a little bit more about what to do in that case but for those of you who have not yet given away your virginity may i ask you in god's name to face the truth of his of his word our bodies are not meant for ourselves to present that body to him as a living sacrifice and to bring all your desires for the opposite sex that natural good holy desire as long as it's brought under the lordship of jesus christ remember that sex was god god's idea it wasn't ours and c.s lewis says you wouldn't have thought of it bring all of that under the lordship of jesus christ present it to him and say lord here i am all of me all of my desires for you forever i testify to you today you'll never be sorry may god give you the strength to make that final choice ligonier ministries the teaching fellowship of r.c sproul presents passion and purity with elizabeth elliott this message is entitled virginity is an irreplaceable gift a few years ago i lived across the street from a high school and on those miserable november afternoons in massachusetts when there was snow and sleet and rain and mud and everything else i would see high school boys out there on the field putting themselves through the most appalling forms of torture and they were being screamed at and yelled at by what otherwise looked like a perfectly normal adult and they were doing exactly what he said i mean they were throwing themselves face down in the mud and banging into all sorts of dummies and barriers and things and dancing around through rubber tires i don't know what all they were doing but i thought to myself if any other adult were to require children to go through that sort of torture they would be arrested for child abuse now what was happening well you know you can guess it they were trying to learn to play football talk about discipline talk about sacrifice talk about not doing your own thing but somebody else's thing there it was and these kids had actually volunteered for this nobody was making them do it but once they had volunteered and made up their minds that they were going to play football then what do they do they put themselves under somebody else's orders and they play by the rules how often have you heard young people say i don't like rules and i want to do my own thing and i like to do what feels good and i don't feel comfortable with that can you imagine a football player saying that to the coach when he tells him what the next play is going to be he says well you know i'm not so sure i really feel comfortable about that that's not me have you heard that sort of thing well there are some rules and if you're going to play football you've got to go by the rule book and you've got to do exactly what the coach says when the coach says it and the way the coach tells you to and the coach doesn't get up there and say go on out there and have fun man just do your own thing don't mess up the game with a bunch of rules just do what feels right for you how about that idea do what feels right for you well i want to talk to you this time about virginity as an irreplaceable gift virginity is an irreplaceable gift every one of us is born with that gift and we can only give it to one person one time it can never be retracted it can never be replaced it can never be given to anybody else so i would encourage you to give some serious thought to whether or not the giver of this gift of virginity has given us any rules to go by and i'm going to read you a passage from first thessalonians 4 in phillips translation this is what it says god's plan is to make you holy and that entails first of all a clean cut with sexual immorality every one of you should learn to control his body keeping it pure and treating it with respect and never regarding it as an instrument for self-gratification as do pagans with no knowledge of god you cannot break this rule without in some way cheating your fellow men and you whisper and you must remember that god will punish all who do offend in this matter and we have warned you how we have seen this work out in our experience of life the calling of god is not to impurity but to the most thorough purity and anyone who makes light of the matter is not making light of a man's ruling but of god's command it is not for nothing that the spirit god gives us is called the holy spirit now that's clear and hard isn't it god gives us guidelines does he do it to ruin our fun no no more than the coach is out there to ruin the fun of the football players no more than the football rule book is calculated to suppress the individuality and to ruin the pleasure of the players if you want to play football then you're going to do it on this particular size field with these lines drawn in these spots with this kind of a ball and you've got to get over these particular kinds of goal posts if you're going to play with any other kind of a ball any other set of rules any other size field it ain't football right so my talk is on the subject of sexual purity and there are not a whole lot of ifs ands and buts about the way god has arranged these things now why did he arrange it this way for our pleasure for our blessing for our safety for our peace and the more restraint there is the more intense is the power now believe me i have been reading up on some things that are going on in our country today and i've just learned that one of the most serious problems that doctors and psychiatrists are dealing with among college students and young singles is impotence impotence can you imagine why because they've been trying to find satisfaction in everybody's bed and they can't find it in anybody's now god gave us these rules to restrain the tremendous power of sexual passion i'm talking about passion and i'm talking about purity and the two things go together in god's mind and it is possible to restrain that kind of power in the jungle of ecuador when you go from the high andes down to a little jumping off place for the mission stations called shelmera there's a tremendous river called the pastasa and it's restrained as it goes through the ravine of the andes and the power of the waterfalls and of the current in those narrow restrained rock walls is absolutely awesome but when it gets down to the jungle the land is flat and you can look as you fly in through that ravine and you see that tremendously powerful river just spread out all over the plain and it's just little tiny trickles little rivulets here and there there is no power left because there is no restraint virginity is an irreplaceable gift if you buy a car and you can't figure out where the bright lights are or how to open the trunk and you try everything you can think of when all else fails what do you do next read the instructions that's right you buy some kind of a kitchen gadget you can't make the crazy thing work when all else fails you read the directions well i'm trying to give you the directions before all else fails in this matter of sexuality let me read you another passage in first corinthians the sixth chapter just as plain and non-confusing as paul's word to the thessalonians this is paul writing to the church in corinth and i'm told that corinth was a very very wicked filthy city with pornography everywhere and prostitution and you name it so paul says this to those christians as a christian i may do anything but that does not mean that everything is good for me i must not be a slave of anything but you cannot say that our physical body was made for sexual promiscuity it was made for god and god is the answer to our deepest longings now i'm sure that as a young person i felt that my deepest longing naturally speaking was for a husband that's what i wanted more than anything else in the world but yet deeper than that when it came right down to it i knew that what i really wanted was the will of god because i had prayed for that when i was 12 years old i prayed that the lord would take my whole life and do anything he wanted with it i prayed a prayer of a missionary in china by the name of betty scott stam and this is the words this is the prayer that she prayed and the prayer that i made mine when i was 12 years old lord i give up all my own plans and purposes all my own desires and hopes and accept thy will for my life i give myself my life my all utterly to thee to be thine forever fill me with thy holy spirit use me as thou wilt send me where thou wilt work out thy whole will in my life at any cost now and forever so when i fell in love with jim elliott as i have described to you in my first talk it was as if the lord was saying to me have you changed your mind whose will do you really want and i had to say yours lord but oh lord i sure hope it includes jim elliott i sure hope you're going to give him to me as a husband and the lord said trust me i've had girls come to me so many times and say well miss elliott do you think the lord's ever going to tell me whether he's going to give me a husband and i said possibly not not until the time comes if he's going to give you a husband you'll know when the time comes but if he's never going to give you a husband he may never tell you that so that you're going to live the rest of your life hoping but our attention our love our energies must be directed on god not on whatever our desires may be in this life so back to what paul says to the corinthian church the body was made for god and god not sex is the answer to our deepest longings have you realized the almost incredible fact that your body's this physical body of yours male or female is an integral part of christ himself am i then to take parts of christ and join them to a prostitute never and then i'll skip over a few verses he says avoid sexual looseness like the plague and there is a plague intimately connected now with sexual looseness isn't there who doesn't know about the danger of aids avoid sexual looseness like the plague every other sin that a man commits is done outside his body but this is an offense against his own body have you forgotten that your body is the temple of the holy spirit who lives in you and is god's gift to you and that you are not the owner of your own body can you imagine that being a popular concept in the late 20th century you are not the owner of your own body what is the world telling you from all sides we are bombarded we are bludgeoned with lies just pure lies have it your way if it feels good do it it's your body you have a right to your body and what does the bible say you are not your own you were bought with a price therefore glorify god in your body those are the words of the king james version he says here you have been bought and at what a price therefore bring glory to god in your body nowadays we see the ravages the wrecks the destruction wrought by sexual looseness not only aids but abortion the rise in divorce rates the chances of a couple being divorced if they have had pre-marital sex are very much higher than the chances of those who have not had pre-marital sex there's statistics that will scare you now my heart goes out to you young people i want you to know that i am not standing up here as an old woman who has never been through what you've been through i'm doing my very best to help you to see and the reason that i'm willing to expose myself and tell you some of the more intimate things about my first falling in love is so that you'll know i have been there even though it was a thousand years ago the memories are very vivid so whose are you if you are putting yourself under the orders of jesus christ then that means obedience if you are willing to be on his terms that means discipleship and discipline if you are willing to live for his purpose then i can promise you that the ultimate end is joy what do you think god really wants for you more than anything else he wants bliss fulfillment perfection joy now any mother any father knows that that couldn't be anything but true because no mother and no father can want anything but bliss and fulfillment and joy and perfection for his or her children god is our father he loves us far more than our earthly parents and his ultimate aim for us is joy the bible says in thy presence is fullness of joy at thy right hand there are pleasures not the temporary kind that the world is offering and i do not deny that the world can offer you plenty of fun plenty of pleasures for which you will pay a very high price but the bible says at thy right hand our pleasures forevermore so i'm here i sometimes i want to scream and jump up and down and shake people and say will you listen to this and of course i can't do that but in every way that i possibly can not only in the writing of this book passion and purity but every every chance i have to speak to young people i plead with them be obedient to god make a decision as to whose you are in romans the 12th chapter we read present your bodies as a living sacrifice holy acceptable unto god which is an act of spiritual worship it amazes me to think that god permits me to present this ordinary female quite tall middle-aged body to him as a living sacrifice and it becomes in the presentation holy and acceptable unto god and an act of spiritual worship so when you surrender your sex life your love your desire to god it is an act of spiritual worship and he accepts it as such when you say lord anything you say well then you're going to have to do what jim elliott did if you say anything you say lord you're going to have to find out what the lord is saying and the only way to do that is to read your bible and to pray and there is no substitute for that you're going to have to sacrifice something maybe sleep maybe activities i don't know but if you're dead serious as jim elliott was you're going to find a way to read your bible and to pray in reading your bible you can hear god speak to you in prayer you can speak to god and listen to what he has to say to you as well but jim said a soldier on active service does not become entangled in civilian affairs but he must be holy at his commanding officer's disposal how can you know what your commanding officer's orders are if you're not listening if you're not giving him time in silence and solitude to speak to you so let me say three things to you you've got to make this decision as to who's you are then you've got to take get his orders by reading your bible and praying it has to be on his terms and to go back to jim elliot again and the question of whether or not he was a real man or was he some sort of a spiritual paragon or something let me read you a poem that he wrote in the midst of his agonizing over whether or not he was ever going to marry me this was long this was before he went to ecuador so it was several years before he and i were married o lord against this bosom blast of coiled and seething feelings battering passions ebbing yearnings oozing ache of inner man any of you men ever experienced any of this raised thou the flinty walls of stuff of which thy son was made yea build in me the buttrest bastions of faith that shall resist the unr under sucking flow of soulish tide and make me to endure this late attack i pray in jesus name now there's a man that was struggling he was not a man with no passions it just irritates me when people come up to the book table and they'll pick up this book and say passion and purity oh that'd be a great book for my daughter that'd be a great book for my girlfriend i say wait a minute why isn't it a great book for you why isn't a great book for your sons is it that men have no passion or is it that men have no interest in purity why should it be the women who are always expected to be the pure ones women don't have any passions men don't have any purity is that the way it goes well i hope i've got news for you i am certainly a woman of passions you can ask my husband i think he would agree you have to make a decision as to who's you are you set yourself to live your life on his terms that is god's order and on god's terms means that the man is made to be the initiator and the woman is made to be the responder now i haven't got time to say anything much about that matter but if you disagree with that then you need to read your bible a little bit more carefully and i would suggest that you also might want to read my book let me be a woman which talks about what femininity is and my book the mark of a man which talks about what masculinity is because we do live in a time when there's been much confusion about masculinity and femininity due to the feminist movement isn't it ironic that women who call themselves feminists are very rarely interested in discussing femininity well it was god's idea to make us masculine or feminine and the two things are not ever meant to be in competition but rather complementary we are to live in harmony one is the leader one is the follower one is in charge and the buck stops with him now why do i tell you this at this point well because it has something to do with the way we go about dating and i will get into that in my third talk but god's terms include god's order and the third thing i must be willing to live for his purpose now here is where faith must come in do you really believe that god's ultimate purpose for you is fulfillment i've been through a good many things in my life which were not according to the way i thought things ought to work certainly not according to my expectations of what god was going to allow to happen in my life when i went to ecuador as a missionary back in 1952 i thought i was very well prepared to be a missionary after all i'd grown up in a missionary house i'd gone read missionary books i'd listen to missionary talks i'd looked at thousands of missionary slides i had gone to a christian high school and a christian college and a bible school and i was prepared linguistically so i thought i'm just all set and within the very first year there were three major blows just one two three to my faith where god was shaking me up and everything that was shakeable got shaken and god was saying to me will you trust me now i don't know any area in which a young person is more likely to be shaken and perhaps to collapse than in the area of sex and each time that this happened to me things that had nothing to do with sex but in other areas god was saying to me will you trust me do you really believe that i love you and i had to say yes lord i i really do believe you love me and as far as i can remember i have never doubted the love of god jesus loves me this i know not because everything in my life has worked out beautifully not because circumstances convince me that jesus loves me and everybody else in the world jesus loves me this i know because the bible tells me so and what does it tell me it tells me about the cross one of my favorite hymns when i was 14 years old and still is was beneath the cross of jesus and the second stanza says i take o cross thy shadow for my abiding place i ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of his face and i can remember at the age of 14 stopping and puzzling over those words i ask no other sunshine i wanted all kinds of sunshine besides the sunshine of his face content to let the world go by to know no gain or loss my sinful self my only shame my glory all the cross and it is the cross that proves that he loves me jesus died he paid the ultimate sacrifice is it possible that he could die for me and not want for me ultimate fulfillment so i'm asking you to believe and it takes faith you're not going to see the evidence right away but you must put your faith in the love of god in his purpose he loves you he made you and he will help you young people sometimes say to me well i'm 17. maybe i can keep my purity till i'm 18 or 19 but i just don't know whether i can hold out until i'm 25 or whatever time the lord gives me a wife one young man after i'd spoken on this subject and a church came charging out to the book table in the narthex and he said but holy cow lady you gotta have sex and i said you do where'd you get that idea thousands of men have lived without sex their whole lives for the sake of jesus christ jesus himself was human and don't ever forget that the scripture says he was tempted in every point as we are so he knows he has been through that valley christ leads you through no darker rooms than he went through before so i would say to that young person who isn't sure he can hold out for three more years you don't have to hold out for three more years you have to hold out till midnight tonight till you get back home tonight one day at a time and it's one hour at a time and it says in isaiah 50 verse 7 the lord god will help me therefore shall i not be confounded therefore have i set my face like a flint and i know that i shall not be ashamed now i took those words and i said lord give me grace to fulfill your word and i'm sure that that's the way jim prayed to one of jim's favorite poems of amy carmichael's was about having scars and he used to quote this poem when he would go out and speak on missions to student groups and it ends up can he have followed far who has no wound or scar it's going to be tough and there will be wounds and there will be scars but the lord god will help you and if you say well what if he doesn't give me what i want what you want is happiness isn't it do you think you can find it without him do you think you can find happiness somewhere outside of the will of god i've got news for you there's only one place in the universe where you will find true happiness it's the will of god there's only one place in the universe where you will find safety and it's in the will of god can you believe that now i'm going to read you another letter from jim elliott just to prove to you that he was a man of passion he wrote to me just before no this was after we got engaged again we were separated by the two ranges of the andes i was in the western jungle of ecuador he was over in the eastern jungle took about six weeks to get a letter across those andes and this is what he wrote these next two weeks will be long ones i fear as the rains have come and we must be inside most of the day i cannot spend hour after hour studying phrases like pete his colleague pete was and he were both learning the quechua language i get wild as a stalled stallion waiting in the radio room studying the forest across the river and facing the gray empty sky i love you strongly tonight with a sense of power a huge surging hope inside me as to the fulfillment of our love it's not the quiet longing that is usually on me but the up flung fists and the shouting for possession and both arms eager to crush you to me it is the bursting heart and the wild eye of passion it is a tenseness and a daring a call to crush and conquer does that sound like a man does that sound like a real man to you well i'm here to tell you i know a man when i see one and god has given me three of them according to the rules that by his grace i have kept and one of the rules that my mother told me was don't chase men i obeyed look what god has done for me now i'm not standing here to tell you that god's going to give you even one husband or one wife i can't do that because i'm here to tell you that in the will of god you are going to find fulfillment and joy now for those whose passion has already overcome their purity let me say this the blood of jesus christ cleanses from all sin it cleanses from all sin what can wash away my sin nothing but the blood of jesus i give you the cross and his blood my friend calvin thielmann a pastor in montreat north carolina tells a story of an old scottish preacher who as he was serving the bread and wine of the lord's supper noticed a girl sobbing at the communion rail as he pastored the bread the visible sign of the broken body of the lord jesus and jesus had said i give it for the life of the world the girl turned away her face which was wet with tears and the preacher said take it lassie it's for sinners god can never give you back your virginity but he will give you back your chastity your purity will you trust him will you give him your whole life starting today god bless you ligonier ministries the teaching fellowship of rc sproul presents passion and purity with elizabeth elliott this message is entitled moving toward marriage [Music] our series is called passion and purity my first talk was on a young man in love i told you a little bit about how jim elliot and i fell in love in college and surrendered our feelings for each other to god and it was a long and agonizing wait before god actually brought us together a time of five and a half years before he brought us together as husband and wife then my second talk was entitled virginity is an irreplaceable gift and in this third talk i would like to be as practical as down to earth as i possibly can in giving you some guidelines as to how to preserve that virginity or if you've already given your virginity away how you may return to chariot to chastity how to return to chastity and purity and bring your love life under the lordship of jesus christ and so i've entitled this talk a man moves toward marriage maybe i should say moving toward marriage because i certainly will be giving some hints for women too but i i am deeply concerned about the way men are going about this whole business of what we used to call courtship i don't even know whether there is such a word anymore but the letters i get would indicate that the whole dating scene is absolute chaos from what college students are telling me whether it's secular universities or christian colleges the scene seems to be in just as big trouble in either case and i think that it was josh mcdowell i may be misquoting but i think it was josh mcdowell who did some kind of a survey that indicated that the sexual morays of secular colleges were exactly the same as those on christian campuses now that is pretty appalling and i do hear stories that would corroborate that firsthand and one of the things that seems to characterize the baby boom generation the people that were born between 1946 and 1964 is an unwillingness to make a commitment i read that the baby boom people were very good at committing themselves in groups for example the student protests during the 1960s and the riots and those kinds of things woodstock would be another example they were great at group commitments but any time it involved an individual choice and a decision they become paralyzed so even though the college students now are younger than the baby boom generation i think we've all been affected by some of the things that took place back in the late 50s and the 60s so one of the one of the names that has been applied to baby boomers is the postponed generation everywhere my husband and i go we meet the most beautiful christian women just elegant feminine dedicated to the lord and they're getting on toward 30 35 40 and there don't seem to be any men we get letters from these women we do get some letters from men too i've had a number of letters from young men who tell me that they're hoping that god is going to give them a virgin but they don't think there are any left and the women that have come across their paths have been very far from being virgins in fact one of them described them as barracudas and they're out there to get their man well this is a tragic situation obviously marriage is the will of god for most men and most women and i think that we can generally assume that each one is each one needs to take it seriously and to do a lot of praying about it now i think i can speak for most of the young women that they are doing the praying they're doing a lot of very plain and fancy praying that the lord will bring christian men into their lives and give them the gift of marriage but i find it it seems to be rare for a young man to be taking seriously as a matter of responsibility before god his adult job his adult duty to become a man to put away childish things to settle down and become a husband and then a father now as you know i have spent some time with primitive tribes in south america and in each of these tribes there were certain rituals or rites of passage through which a young man had to go in order to be recognized as passing from childhood to manhood i have never heard of a primitive tribe that has a word for teenager and when i was growing up i was never a teenager because there was no such thing that term was coined during the baby boom generation when we became so conscious of these enormous numbers of children because the population really did explode at that time that we had to give names to these various age groups but as i read my bible i noticed that there are children and there are adults but there are no teenagers and i think it's significant i think it's very significant that jesus made a clear break with his parents his earthly parents mary and joseph at the age of 12. and you remember that they when they went to jerusalem and went back again were on their way home they had traveled three days the parents when they discovered that jesus was not with them they went back and sought him sorrowing throughout the city and finally found him sitting there a 12 year old boy confounding the rabbis and the scribes with his knowledge of the scriptures i don't think we can dismiss that scene as not applicable to ourselves jesus was god of course but he was still human and he still had to be a child and he had to be subject to his parents but you remember his answer when mary said to him why have you done this to us we have sought you sorrowing and he said didn't you know that i must be about my father's business and at the age of 12 we need to start treating our children as responsible and if you have not taught them to be responsible for the first 12 years then it's going to be very difficult job but i'm speaking today about male responsibility in the matter of marriage i'm not going to leave you women out i'm going to give you some hints as well but i think of the alca indians for example a tribe that i lived with and every every girl had to learn to weave hammocks and make pots and plant manioc and catch fish with her hands by the time she was eight years old or ten years old she could do all of these things perfectly you can imagine the consternation and the total perplexity of the alka indians when they saw this not only full-grown but really giant foreigner in their midst i was taller than the tallest man and my and the tallest woman was about up to my shoulder when they realized that i could not make hammocks i couldn't weave hammocks i couldn't make clay pots i couldn't catch fish with my hands i couldn't do anything that a normal adult woman could do or even a ten-year-old girl they had to take responsibility and the boys learned from their fathers to make blow guns and spears to shoot blow guns and they had to take their share of going out and looking for meat so they were not children from the time they were 10 years old and on now that seems very cruel in our very laid-back and postponed society where children are permitted to be children up until the age of 35. i mean when you see a man who is completely absorbed with dirt bikes for example or those high-wheeled trucks that go through mud you know you see them on tv i i can't believe my eyes but nine times out of ten they're men in their late 20s 30s 40s playing hang gliding scuba diving dirt biking and all the rest of it there is something radically wrong with our society and my heart goes out to all these dear christian women that i know who are trying to be obedient to god's order not go out looking for a husband but waiting on god and it's not easy to wait only on god scripture says my soul wait thou only upon god and many of them are living their lives waiting on the men and the men are not visible not available courtship has fallen on hard times dating seems to be almost non-existent in fact sometimes i'm asked what is a date well back in my day we all knew what a date was a man did the asking a man decided where you were going and a man of course picked up the tab and just last week i was in nebraska and speaking to a singles class in church and one of the questions that was raised in the question and answer period was what is a date and one girl said well you know sometimes i pick up the tab and i said to her don't you ever do that again because in a sense you know you're really denying the man his masculine responsibility which is to take charge to take care of you and if he is the one who does the asking then of course he picks up the tab and if he hasn't got the money to pick up the tab he can ask a girl out for the first date that i ever had with jim elliott at the same kind of a date it was a coke and he called me up at the dormitory and he said how about a coke date and that was it that was the only date we ever had except going to a missionary meeting in chicago and the only money that he had was enough for the train fare to get to chicago he did not have enough money to buy me a meal or even an ice cream cone and i appreciated that i understood that and i certainly understand the difficulty that young people have in having any extra money and yet it's amazing how much money they have when it comes to buying a new cd or whatever else they seem to want you know those designer jeans or something so some practical suggestions having given you all that by way of introduction i have 11 things that i'm going to give you by way of a a method that i really believe works if you want to move toward adult responsibility and as i said in my first talk i'm not going to claim that this is the law of sinai i'm not going to say that i can give you a scripture verse for each of these 11 things but i am going to say that there are principles behind these and that i have personally seen the validity and the success of this method my father is an example to me of godliness and just recently i've been working on a book which is going to include both my father's and my mother's brief biographies by by way of introduction to what i consider the making of a christian family the book is on that subject and i had really forgotten i'm sure i must have heard the story but my father's been dead since 1963 i had forgotten the story of their courtship and as i read through my father's diaries i discovered that when he met kathryn gillingham who became my mother he also knew margaret haynes and charlotte bunting and somebody else and so in the diary entries i'd find margaret one day in charlotte the next day and katherine the next day and margaret but it was never a date it was never a date it was only i saw charlotte bunting in church or i walked home with charlotte bunting or i was invited to margaret haynes's home by mrs haynes which is certainly a proper way of going about introducing your daughter to nice men or catherine gillingham came over while i was at margaret haynes's and for several months i keep reading about margaret and charlotte and catherine well then he gets invited by margaret haynes to maine to what used to be called a house party in those days and margaret was the hostess and there were going to be several young people there my father was one of the earlier arrivals and as they were standing on the dock of this summer place on an island in maine the boat approached the dock the gang plank was put down and down the gangplank came catherine gillingham and my father stood there on the dock next to margaret haynes and he said to himself there is the woman that i want for my wife this was thursday afternoon on saturday he asked my mother to go for a walk and she assuming that he meant the whole gang she said sure let's all go for a walk so she invited everybody and they all went for a walk and saturday night he came along and he asked her again if she if she would take a walk with him and she did exactly the same thing again so in desperation on sunday he said may i take you to church alone and she thought what is it with this guy you know i mean he must be he's margaret haynes's friend and so she consented rather with perplexity and puzzlement and he proposed to her they had never had a date they had had many opportunities to observe each other from a distance and jim elliott and i only had two dates one was the coke in the student center one was the missionary meeting but i knew there was no question in my mind that this man had the qualities and the character and the godliness that were at the top of my list for the things that i was looking for lars and i met a couple when we were in india whose marriage had been arranged as virtually all indian marriages are they were christians and both sets of parents were christians but their parents had arranged the marriage with no consultation of course with the couple themselves the man had seen the bride from a distance before she had never laid eyes on him until they were married and after in the wedding ceremony then her veil is removed and she sees her groom for the first time and she told us how god had worked these things out and it was indeed a very beautiful marriage that they had and when i hear stories about the arranged marriages which is what most of human race throughout most of human history has had don't forget in the bible they were arranged marriages the score of success is a whole lot higher than the do-it-yourself method we have here so i would love to go back to arranged marriages but i'm not going to suggest that i was with a couple the other night who had such beautiful children and i said i'd like to arrange some marriages with my grandchildren and they said well my four children are already spoken for by so-and-so anyway the first thing that i would say to a man who wants to do business with god about this is you must make a choice the choice that i talked about in my first talk is it going to be god's will or mine if you have not made that choice then i can't help you with anything else that has to be between you and god will you do what god wants you to do the second thing is to begin praying if you have not already gotten down to business on your knees before god let me suggest that at least by the age of 18 you should be considering yourself a responsible adult young people want to be adults at 15 or 16 when it comes to getting a driver's license don't they but paying the bills that's a whole other thing voting and buying liquor and getting a driver's license they want to be adults real soon but i think in god's economy it's perfectly clear that god arranged the reproductive system so that it works by the time you're 11 or 12 or 13. does that tell us anything at all about god's attitude towards children and adults so at the age of 18 at the latest you ought to be serious with god about this thing and praying and as i told you earlier i started to pray when i was 16 that god would never allow me to fall in love with a man that i was not going to marry and god answered that prayer the third thing confess your sins if there have been sexual sins certainly those need to be confessed and laid out before god and i'm speaking of confessing them to god if they have been sexual sins then you certainly need to ask the forgiveness of the individual against whom you have sinned but you can start over and god will cleanse you and give you back your chastity number four serious prayer about the matter of marriage number two is you must begin praying about your whole life's plan but if in fact it appears that god's will is probably marriage for you and as i said i think most of us can assume that it is god's will because the majority of people do marry then you must grow up paul said when i became a man i put away childish things and put away your obsession with entertainment and sports and leisure time and realize that the serious business of life involves taking on a family and being able to support that family and that's very serious business i've been reading some of the biographies of the 19th century especially looking for the stories of their courtships and it is amazing how often the story is very similar to my father and mothers now i didn't finish the story of my father he proposed to my mother she didn't give him an answer she was absolutely thunderstruck she hadn't the slightest warning whatsoever so she said well i'm going to have to pray about this and think about it and she made him wait for six weeks before she gave him yes but during that time they really didn't see very much of each other i read a biography of a man named charles alexander who was the song leader with dl moody for part of his career d.l moody also traveled with ira d sankey but charles m alexander was a hymn writer and also one of his uh accompanists and song leaders and charles alexander was traveling with d.l moody from the time he was about 20 until he was 27. so they were all around the world and they had very little time in any one place so charles had virtually no chance to get to know any women but he was very eager to find a wife and he'd been praying all along that the lord would give him a wife but he had a long list of qualifications when he got to be 27 he was in england and this whole matter kept coming before him and he really wanted to find a godly wife and this time he got down on his knees and he said lord here's my list this is what i have been looking for and i haven't found her now lord i'll take your list you give me the wife that you know is appropriate for me maybe if you gave me this list she wouldn't be the right one so lord i'll take the woman that you want to give me and very shortly thereafter there was a very attractive young woman on the platform with him and mr moody he noticed her he was impressed with her dignity her femininity her beauty or something i don't think that was even mentioned in the biography whatever it was he was attracted to her and she stood up and gave a testimony he did not know her name but he said to himself that is the woman i want to marry a godly woman her testimony had proved to him that she was on the same wavelength that he wanted to be on himself he went back that night to the mansion where he was staying and it turned out that his hostess was the aunt of this young woman he asked for an introduction he took her out for dinner the next night or maybe two or three nights later and he proposed and she married him now when i tell stories like this people think there is no way that that could ever work in this day and age but i'm talking about a young man who has prayed for seven years and he has not been dating during that time he has simply been praying and watching and waiting number five i would say you need to define a date now unfortunately we do not have rituals and rites of passage which signal the passing from childhood into adulthood i think we lose a great deal by that the only thing that even comes close would be sports and i think one of the reasons that american men are so obsessed with sports is because they have no other way of proving to the world that they are men if they had the rights of passage that primitive tribes have they wouldn't need to prove anything would be very obvious so you need to define a date which is a very poor substitute for the rights of passage but it seems to be the only thing we've got left in our society and it ought to be a time when a man recognizes himself as a gentleman and this woman as a lady and it's a way of signaling and i'm not saying that these are the words that he would use in inviting her on a date but simply a way of saying in effect i'm a gentleman and i would like to treat you like a lady for one evening and i'm not recommending that you do any dating at all until you've done the kind of praying that i'm talking about the date that i've told you about that charles m alexander had with his future wife is a sensible one but it should be considered as an approach to marriage for this reason i am opposed to dating among teenagers especially one on one i think it's fine to have lots of group activities which are supervised by the church or by your families but you need to be very clear that brother and sister relationships which are good terms to describe our spiritual relationship that is not a an appropriate term to describe what you and i both know is something quite different from brother and sister when we are sexually attracted to one of the opposite sex that's when you want a date and i'm speaking of sexually attracted in the very broadest sense it doesn't mean you date somebody because you want to go to bed with them but i think there's a lot of self-deception and dishonesty about relationships oh well she's just a sister or he's just a prayer partner or it's just a platonic relationship 99 times out of 100 according to the correspondence that i have and the conversations that i have with young people in these quote platonic relationships one or the other is going to fall in love and get their heart broken so be very careful now number six i'm going to recommend that you quit dating all together now that sounds outrageous and when i said this last week in nebraska i was thrilled to death when i finished speaking the leader of this singles class stood up and he said i want to corroborate what elizabeth has just said not that she needs corroboration but he said i want to give you my testimony and he told us how he had really messed up the lives of a couple of girls by breaking their hearts and he said i finally realized that my whole attitude was wrong that i had never submitted this business to god and so he decided to quit dating and to get to know god and so he said for the next nine years i did no dating i only prayed and he said when i was 29 the lord brought the woman into my life without ever any dates and he didn't give us he didn't go into detail as to how he did meet that woman but i was so grateful for his testimony because i thought here's a contemporary not an old lady standing up and saying it works it does work even in the late 20th century number seven learn god's order i haven't got time to go into that but you can read about it in my book let me be a woman in the mark of a man remember that as a woman you are not to go chasing the boys my mother said don't chase them and keep them at arm's length those are the only two rules she gave me i kept both of them remember that god's design for men and women is harmony not competition complementarity not interchangeability number eight and perhaps this is one of the most important things find some prayer support and counsel from some older christian if it can be your parents all well and good so much the better but i can't tell you how my own life has been blessed by spiritual mothers and spiritual fathers in addition to my own parents who prayed for me one spiritual mother in particular an old lady that i met up in canada prayed for years that the lord would bring jim and me together i had poured out my soul to her shared all my feelings with her about him and although she had never met him she began to pray that god would bring us together my parents prayed for four of the specific spouses of their six children they didn't know the other two in advance but for for years they prayed for four specific people that they would marry their children and those four people married those children now that says something to me and none of us got into chaotic situations in advance so find some prayer support from somebody who may be older than you at least older than you spiritually somebody who knows how to keep his mouth shut and somebody who can give you godly counsel by all means if that person has a suggestion take it very seriously because that person has some perspective on you and on the other person that you can't possibly have they may know you better than you know yourself and if they suggest somebody and you think him you know her i could never go for him or her you just might be mistaken that that could be god's choice and remember that god's will for you means joy number nine is observation watch the person from a distance a church is a good place to watch them from a distance a college campus a neighborhood and granted there are it is difficult nowadays to know how to do this but when abraham sent his servant to look for a wife for his son isaac the bible says that the servant watched quietly and prayed silently and i think that is a very good rule imagine abraham sent his servant to find the wife and the servant found the wife of god's choice by watching quietly and praying silently observation then when you do get into conversation let it be friendly and casual as it would be with a member of your own sex you don't immediately jump into talking about sex and how many children you're going to have and what you think about marriage and i am up to here with young men who take a girl out and want her to put all the cards on the table they want to know everything about her then they want to know how she feels about them then they want to know if they've got a chance if they should ask her to marry them before they take the risk of rejection which a proposal is a young man came to lars and me and he said he'd been in love with a girl for two years and he hadn't proposed to her yet and we said why not and he said well because i don't really know how she feels and lara said i'll tell you the best way in the world to find out how she feels tell her i love you will you marry me you will find out very quickly how she feels you have no business finding out unless you have said i love you and will you marry me my father told my four brothers don't ever tell a woman you love her until you're ready to immediately follow that statement with will you marry me so that's number 10 conversation avoid intimate subjects it is none of your business number 11 if you date draw the lines in advance about how far you're going to go now jim and i decided that we were not going to even hold hands and i can just imagine some people watching me and saying now don't tell me that this lady is going to stand up there and tell me it's a sin to hold hands no i'm not going to tell you it's a sin to hold hands but i'm going to tell you that it is one method that does work if you never hold hands you're never going to kiss if you never kiss you're never going to hug if you never hug there's never going to be any further progress toward bed and after all it was god's intention wasn't it that the first touch between a man and a woman who are attracted to each other should be exciting and that that touch leads to something else and that leads to something else that was god's intention and so i would ask you this question do you know the safe place to draw the line can you be absolutely sure that it is safe i couldn't tell you how many young people have said to me well i just don't know how it happened you know but somehow or other we ended up in bed and i lost my virginity i say no you didn't lose it you gave it away so i can guarantee that if you follow the rules that i've just given you you will never end up pregnant by mistake nor will you ever end up being the father of a child that you did not intend to father moving toward marriage for women let me just say this you must surrender all your desires you must be a lady you must pray you must offer up your feelings to god and you must wait only upon god and in closing i want to give you a few verses from psalm 37 trust in the lord and do good depend upon the lord and he will grant you your heart's desire commit your life to the lord trust in him and he will act and verse 7 wait quietly for the lord be patient until he comes god bless you you

Channel: The Elisabeth Elliot Foundation

Views: 23,951

Rating: 4.9348149 out of 5

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Id: c6xlmNT39ts

Length: 96min 2sec (5762 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020